Oral History Transcript - Clarence Schultz - April 1, 1986
Interview with Dr. Clarence Schultz
Interviewer: Howard N. Baker
Transcriber: Howard N. Baker
Date of Interview: April 1, 1986
Location: Dr. Schultz’s Office, Room 211, Flowers Hall
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
_____________________
Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Howard N. Baker: This is an interview with Dr. Clarence Schultz, professor of sociology at Southwest Texas State University. Dr. Schultz received both his Bachelors of Science and a Master’s Degree in history from Southwest Texas State University. From 1953 until 1965, Dr. Schultz served as chairman of the social science department at Lee College in Baytown. In 1965, he returned to Southwest Texas State University. In 1970, he completed his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He was also named the first chairman of the university’s newly formed Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Southwest Texas State. This interview is being conducted on April 1, 1986 in Dr. Schultz’s office in 211 Flowers Hall. The interviewer is Howard Baker, representing [the] Southwest Texas State University history department.
Dr. Schultz, why did you decide to become a student at Southwest Texas, and when did you first get here?
Clarence Schultz: I came to San Marcos in September 1947, and I had been living in McAllen, Texas, and worked for a variety chain, McClellan Stores, as an assistant manager. My wife and I lived in some apartments in McAllen that were managed by a school teacher, and she found that I had completed three years of college. This was before the Second World War. She encouraged me to go back and finish my degree, so I went back and I started looking for someplace to attend school, get a teacher’s certificate, and some place that had housing. We looked at several teacher’s colleges in the state at that time, title colleges like Southwest Texas and North Texas and East Texas, etcetera—and Dean Speck, who was dean of men at that time, wrote back to me and told me that they could indeed find me an apartment here at San Marcos, if I would like to come.
So, my wife and I arrived in September 1947. School in those days, fall semester started about September fifteenth. We arrived here and found that the apartment was in an old house. It had quite a number of apartments, a two-story house, and we were reluctant to live in it because we were afraid possibly of fire or something, so we found another apartment. It was also a house that had been cut into four apartments. It was one-floor and was located about where Sterry Hall is at the present time. We moved into this apartment, which had a bedroom, small kitchen, and we shared a bathroom. That was about it. Those days, there were no apartments like there is today. They were all houses that had been private residences that had been cut up into apartments. One of the things that I vividly remember at that time is that the beginning and ending of classes was signaled at that time by a bell, which was rung by a janitor on campus. The bell was located up where the Chemistry Building is at the present time. This particular custodian took enormous pride in being responsible for the ringing of the bell. He had a railroad watch, which he checked periodically to make sure it was rung from the precise time. When we lived at the bottom of the hill, where Nelson Center is right now, he would ring that bell, and we had plenty of time to go up the hill and get to classes. The campus was, of course, concentrated within this area; roughly, where Evans Buildings is now on up to Old Main. On some occasions, like bad weather or the custodian would get involved with something else, he would be delayed in getting there, and this would throw the rest of the schedule off. And I’m sure this caused people downtown a lot of trouble because those people generally could check their own watches and make sure that their own time downtown was right by the ringing of that bell. You could hear it all the way downtown; it was really a large bell. I’m not sure what has happened to it. When they started tearing down Lueders Hall and built the Chemistry Building, that bell was moved, and I’m not sure what has happened to it.
Baker: This guy was the time clock for the whole city?
Schultz: He was the time clock for at least the downtown area of the city and, of course, for the university itself. He was well-known by all the students. He was very, very significant. I can’t remember exactly when we started using the bell. I guess we started using the electric bells sometime in the period after I left in 1953 and before I came back here in 1965. My undergraduate work extended from here 1947 to 1948. At that time, Dr. Alfred Nolle was dean of the college. When you wanted to get a degree outline, you did not go to the chair of your department, but you went to Dean Nolle, who was officing then at Old Main on the first floor. He made the degree outlines for every student on campus. At the time I was here, there were about 2500–3000 students that were on campus in the long session. Actually, enrollment in the summer time was sometimes larger than it was in the long session because there were people coming back to finish their college degree. Particularly, women who were teaching elementary school would come back. See, it was not until 1949 that the State of Texas had a minimum base salary for all teachers in the state of Texas. At that time, in 1949, it was $189 a month. And that would be guaranteed to a teacher, if a teacher would finish a degree. Prior to 1949, you did not have to have a degree to teach. You could teach elementary school with only two years of education. I think probably the assumption, an erroneous one, was that these are little kids, and you really don’t have to know very much to teach them, so two years was all that was required. So, in the summertime, you would have a large number of women who were coming back trying to finish their degree.
Baker: You mentioned housing earlier, could you tell me a little about Dog Patch, the housing area here?
Schultz: The university acquired [it] from the Gary Air Force Base, which existed in the Second World War and was built then, which is now the Gary Job Corps Center. At the end of the war, the federal government gave to the university a number of buildings, something like barracks; long rectangular buildings. These were located basically where the Physical Education Complex is located today. I would guess that probably there were somewhere between forty to forty-five of those units, each with four apartments in each one. The only thing that even remains in that area or associated with it is our so-called “married student housing” today that we have over there that are cement block houses. But these were actually placed there for the soldiers attached to the Air Force Base and their families. The walls were extremely thin.
My wife and I, like many other people, wanted to get an apartment there as soon as we possibly could because it was the least expensive housing that you could find. We wanted an end apartment, if we could possibly get it, and we were fortunate in getting one because you could always hear all kinds of things going on in the apartment next to you, which you might not really want to be privy to, but you would hear them anyway. The rent on the apartments was $30 a month. That also included all your utilities. The one thing you had to pay for was ice. I mean quite literally ice. Where Peppers at the Falls is located right now was the South Well Ice Company, and there was an iceman who delivered ice to individual apartments. These were not refrigerators, but ice boxes. That meant you had to empty water and so on. You had gas heaters in each apartment. There was certainly no such thing as air conditioning at that time. We made some very fine friends in those days. Most of the people that were out there were veterans and their families. Most of them had very young children, and so there was a lot of common interest in terms of people going to school and sharing the same kind of living conditions. The university would furnish you with paint if you were willing to paint your own apartment, which most people did. Those apartments, as you said, were referred to as “Dog Patch,” which was a term that came out of the Li’l Abner comics, which were quite popular in those days, because you had so many little children running all over the place. To my knowledge, I don’t think we had any apartments in which single people lived. You had to be married in order to live there. We moved there roughly about a year after we had moved to San Marcos. You had to get on a waiting list to get into those apartments.
Baker: That would have been 1948?
Schultz: That was 1948, right. We continued to live there all the way up to 1953, when we left. Once I joined the faculty, there were the other faculty members living out there.
Baker: So the faculty were living with the students.
Schultz: Yes, the faculty were living with the students. I might mention that when Dr. Flowers employed me as a faculty member, I received $2,900 for nine months, which was $311 a month. That was my beginning salary. But that was not too bad in those days. It looked a lot better than the $120 we were living off of as a GI under the GI Bill of Rights.
Baker: What was the city of San Marcos like in the 1940s? Anything that we could recognize today, in 1986?
Schultz: Actually, the downtown area somewhat has some resemblances, but I would say it would be very difficult for many people to be able to identify with the San Marcos of the 1940s. The area that we call Nelson Center, for example, there was a building that was half-completed, and it was a bus station that was being built there. The bus station, for a number of reasons, was never completed. That old frame building just stood there on the corner, right across from where the Alumni House is at the present time. The Alumni House did not actually sit on that particular corner. The Alumni House sat on three lots up in the direction of the university from where it is now located. It was moved to that corner when the university got that property under Urban Renewal in the 1960s. In fact, as late as 1965, when I came back, San Marcos still looked pretty much like it did when I had been here in the late forties and early fifties. That area where the Alumni House is now, there was a tailor shop and a small automobile repair place. Diagonally across from it was the Dodge-Plymouth place that was run by Ross Arnold, who is still living here in San Marcos. His father had been chair of the Department of History at one time. What you think of as the drag, there were a number of small independent businesses. One of my most strong memories of that period was that there were not any, what we think of today, as chain stores, in the downtown area. The only one we had was a Perry’s that sat on a corner of the square. It was diagonal today from where the First Federal Savings and Loan is located. That was a “five and ten,” which would be on a chain. Volgeman’s was a very popular little “five and ten” store. Mr. Vogelman always wore green eyeshades. He had little hanging lights, not fluorescent lamps of any kind, throughout his store. There was a hardware store, a Higgs’s that was on down the road, just a short distance. It was a fascinating place to go into because he had wares displayed by hanging them from the ceiling. There were an enormous amount of things that were hanging down from the ceiling. There was a theatre. The Holiday Theatre did not exist then. The only theatre was in the block where today you find the Varsity; it was there on the corner where the Coin Machine Arcade Center is located, across from where Jeremiah’s is. Jeremiah’s was Cooper’s Cleaners, which existed there until the 1970s.
Baker: So, that is pretty recent.
Schultz: It was fairly recent that the cleaners were moved away. There was a red and white grocery store on one corner of the square. The State Bank Building, which they used in the filming of The Getaway, the old bank building was located directly across from the First Federal Savings and Loan, and you can see the old building today. Down from that was the Parlor Barber Shop, which was a really fabulous barber shop with all kinds of carved accessories built into the walls. Some of that was moved out to the Barn at York Creek, which was closed some years ago and was lost in a fire at that restaurant, about ten years ago. Next to that was the drug store in town, which was Black’s Drug Store. Now, Hillburn’s was here at that time in the forties, but Black’s Drug Store had booths in the back and a big fountain, and that was the big college hangout. You got to remember this was a non-bar town, this is prior to alcoholic beverages being served in San Marcos, and that was a big meeting place.
Baker: So this would be on the west side?
Schultz: That would be on the west side, right.
Baker: Closest to campus?
Schultz: Right and it would be next to where the State Bank and Trust is located today. Where the State Bank and Trust is located was a beautiful post office, which had Spanish tile roof on it. It was very similar to the kind of thing you find on some of our old halls around here, like Beretta Hall. As you come up LBJ, which was not LBJ at that time but Texas Avenue, but if you came up that street, there were houses all the way up that street. It was in the forties that Commons and Beretta Halls were built. Same thing was true on the street where you find the student center today. That was the senior women’s dorm, which was called Sayers Hall, and beyond that going on back toward town were all houses through there. That was even true in 1965. Even when I came back in 1965, behind the Sayers Hall was what they call Allie Evans Cottage. This was a two-story house where young women who went into home economics, who were largely expected to be homemakers, they would actually practice keeping house in that cottage. Several times during the year, they would invite male and female faculty members to come and dine with them. This was a way they could learn to serve and prepare food. All these things to become homemakers.
Baker: So the faculty were their guinea pigs.
Schultz: We were their guinea pigs. That’s right! I was trying to think of something that I should mention to you in terms of stores, but the thing that I most vividly can think of is that you just did not have the kinds of chain stores. I’m not in any way trying to be posing of the kinds of service you can find today, but they were all independent services. One of the big names in men’s clothing at that time was Wood Brothers, which still continued to exist up until the early 1970s. It faced on the square, and when you went in to see Jack Wood, who is, by the way, still living, in his late eighties now, he always stopped and visited. Of course, that is one of the marks of a small town. People really took time out to visit with each other. We had a county sheriff and deputies, but San Marcos itself had two policemen, and there was no squad car, as you think of squad cars today, they just drove their own automobile in the town. So, that gives you some idea that the crime rate wasn’t really all that bad in San Marcos at that time. It might be interesting for you to know that in the late 1940s, when we lived in the apartments, there was no garbage disposal or sanitary system for the town, in the sense of getting rid of garbage for the individual housekeepers. So people burned their garbage in their backyard. This meant that you had a good chance of fires; therefore, many of the roofs of San Marcos at that time had tin roofs on them.
Baker: For that reason.
Schultz: For that very reason.
Baker: Has the city always been geared, I mean like city businesses geared to students, like it is today?
Schultz: Actually, this, of course, is sort of a personal opinion, I think certainly that students did contribute to the finances of the community, but I don’t think that the city as a whole saw this as the industry as we would think of it today or as the main source of revenues of the community. It was still essentially a farming trade center that also happened to also have a teacher’s college located here. One of the spots that I forgot to mention to you is where Balcones Savings and Loan is now located, they have a drive-in section on University Drive, which was Colorado Street in those days, that was where Walling’s Creamery was located. That was like the Blue Bell Creamery, down in Brenham, nowadays. That was a very popular ice cream parlor. Students, faculty, and townspeople often met and visited at Walling’s Creamery. Not only could you get milk deliveries but also buy all kinds of ice creams at that location.
Baker: A little gathering place.
Schultz: Right.
Baker: Today, we are just now going to this pre-registration system; this is supposed to be real easy. Tell me a little about the registration back in the forties. I know there were only three thousand students, but how smooth was registration back then and what kinds of things did y’all have to go through and deal with?
Schultz: Well, registration today, I know students feel that the registration is complex and has a lot of unnecessary red tape, and it may have been a little more casual in the late 1940s, but it was highly disorganized. Registration then took place in the Student Center, which was located up next to Old Main. The Art Building section today that has the Spanish tile roof was the Student Center. Registration took place there. There was no registration by social security numbers or even by alphabet at that time. There was no pre-arrangement. You just simply lined up, and you went in to register depending on where you were in the line. I think I perhaps related this to you once before, but our first child was born in 1948, and I told my wife the morning that he was born, that this day happens to be registration, so I’m going to get up there. Graduate students even lined up also in the same line. There was no separate graduate line. That way I could get in line and get my classes. See, many classes were relatively small classes. As a matter of fact, most graduate classes were taught in combination with the undergraduate classes. They were taught as what we called “hyphenated courses,” so that if a teacher had an undergraduate family course, say like Sociology 3337, then you would have a dash after it, Sociology 3337-53337, and that would mean that there were both graduate and undergraduate students that were both enrolled in that class. If you had the class as an undergraduate class before then you would sit in on some of the lectures of the teacher, but you would also have special projects. And only a few graduate classes were actually taught as what we call “independent seminars” today. There were a few of those, but they were not the bulk of the classes. So you really had to line up. And in coming back to my point, on this particular morning he was born, he was born about 2:00 in the morning out at the Hays Memorial Hospital. Now, Hays Memorial Hospital was on Belvin Street. I can’t recall the fraternity that is in that building that is out on Belvin Street. It is today a fraternity house, but it was the hospital back then.
Anyway, I had been out there with my wife and she had been taken back to the ward, and she didn’t have a private room. I told her about 4:30 in the morning that she appeared okay and that Baby was okay, so I was going to get in line. I got up at registration at about 5:15 a.m., and there was already a line extended down from where the Student Center for registration was all the way down to what we refer today as the Psychology Building, which was not the Psychology Building at that time but was San Marcos High School, which I’ll come back to later. What that really shows is that there was just no plan, no rhyme, no reason to how you would line up. Then you had to worry about people letting their friends in line and so on. When I came back, in 1965, they were already registering by alphabet, not by social security numbers so that they might register A, B, and C from hour to such and such—that meant that you did not know exactly how many people would be registering at that time because you did not have an indication from social security numbers of how many people that you had in a given letter, so you might have a tremendous number that show up at 10:00–11:00 [a.m.] because you were registering people’s last names with C, D, and then you might have very few people with last names with I, J, K, that were supposed to register between 11:00 [a.m.]–12:00 [p.m.]. It was a very awkward kind of system. Registration at that time was moved to Flowers Hall, which even in the late sixties was still the Library Building. They had some classrooms in it also, but it was the library. The awkward floor that we have between the first and second floors were called mezzanine floors, that was the stacks area, and the registration was carried on independently in different classrooms.
I know I am changing the subject on you, but I think I would like to comment on something about the evolution of sociology, and this really takes me back to my own student days. The early organization of the social studies groups: history, geography, political science, economics—which was then in the liberal arts—history, and sociology, all of those were located in what was called the Department of Social Sciences. This was headed by Dr. James Taylor. Dr. Taylor’s name is best remembered on campus now probably through two things: the Taylor lectures, which were given each spring, there is to be one here this very week, and then also his name appears in the hyphenated Taylor-Murphy building. Dr. Retta Murphy was one of the few women on campus that were outside of, she and Miss Sterry, whom I officed with at one time, were outside of the departments, such as physical education and home economics. Dr. Taylor not only gave me my first job—actually as a student assistant, while I was in graduate school, those days, departments did not have secretaries, and Dr. Taylor employed me to type in the department. This really augmented my wife’s and my salary. We got additional $30 a month by my serving as secretary. My duties were usually about three to four hours a day, except when I would grade essay tests for Dr. Taylor and some of the other professors when they would get in a bind on trying to return papers, which by the way, essay quizzes, which were very typical in all classes in those days. You didn’t ask a professor when he or she would return the papers. You normally expected them in two weeks, if lucky, and maybe not even for a month. You had to wait a long time for test results.
When I received my MA degree, there was an opening, a temporary opening, in the department of social science to teach science and sociology. Dr. Taylor asked me if I would like to join the faculty for one year. He convinced Dr. Flowers that, despite the fact that I did not have teaching experience, that I wouldn’t cause too much of a disaster if he employed me for one-year period. In those days, the social science department was located in Old Main, and we were located on the far east side, down on the main floor. It was rather noisy because just below us was what was called the Veterans Café. It had been authorized by the university and was a coffee shop. We didn’t have a student center as you think of it now that serves food. They permitted the Veterans Association to run a coffee shop below the area where we were located as the social science department. Not all the instructors’ offices were on that first floor. Dr. Taylor had an office, I would judge probably now that that office was probably about twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet. He had his desk over in one corner, and he believed that new instructors should office in the same office as him. Mrs. FitzPatrick, who teaches in the history department now, and I officed there, along with Betty Brook Eakle. At one time, Richard Henderson, who is now retired, then became chairman of Department of Social Sciences, also officed in there. When you had conferences with students and after the student left, Dr. Taylor would tell you how he thought you should have conducted the conference. He would come over and advise you in terms of your lectures and your organization. Now, many people remember him as very stern, autocratic kind of man. But if you really came to know him, you would know he was a man with a tremendous heart and a tremendous understanding. He just simply demanded a lot of his students and didn’t have a lot of patience with students who were not serious. In fact, when you were attending his classes in Old Main, as soon as the bell was sounded by the custodian, and it was time to go to class, if you had failed to get to class at the exact time, that was going to be tough because he locked the door. You could not get into the class. There was no being late to his class, and there was no leaving the class until he unlocked the door.
Baker: That needs to be done today. (Chuckle)
Schultz: That might not be a bad idea. I’m sure teachers are tempted today to try that (chuckle) on some occasions. I should mention that Richard Henderson, who was a student here at Southwest Texas, one-time editor of the Star, he was given his start at college teaching by Dr. Taylor, along with a number of other people. Henderson and FitzPatrick and myself were all three protégés of Dr. Taylor out of SWT. Dr. Henderson, now retired, eventually became chair of the Department of Social Science after the death of Dr. Taylor in the 1960s. It was Dr. Henderson who invited me and Dr. Maurice Erickson, who was the economist and who is still living in San Marcos, to come back here in 1965. At that time, they were breaking up the old social science division, and we were passing out of the phase of being a teacher’s college, which was one of the real positive contributions that Dr. McCrocklin made as president to SWT. He helped change the teacher college stage to becoming a true university. But, in any event, part of that was breaking up those old divisions, and the Department of Economics and Sociology were created with Dr. Maurice Erickson as the chair. I joined it in 1965 with the creation of that department. When I received my doctorate in November of 1970, at that time Dr. Billy Mac Jones was president of the university. He and Dr. Ralph Randolph, who was dean of liberal arts, offered me the opportunity to become chair of a new Department of Sociology. Economics at that time was going to join the School of Business, and that was when it was separated off from Liberal Arts. So, I accepted that, and the department was created in January of 1970. At that time, anthropology was being taught in the history department, and there were only two sections of anthropology. The history department decided they no longer—well, the person who was teaching anthropology decided to change positions to another university. So they decided to drop anthropology from the history department. We asked them if we could incorporate it into our department, and that is how we became the sociology/anthropology department. Dr. Walter Corrie, who is still in the Department of Sociology here, took on the responsibility of teaching the anthropology courses because he had post-doctoral work in anthropology as well as sociology until we could get a full-fledged anthropologist. So, thanks to Dr. Corrie, we were able to save anthropology.
Social work was not added until the very early seventies. Ms. Brennen, who was teaching then at Prairie View A&M, accepted the position here to come and teach the first courses that we had in social work, but again we only had a couple of classes in social work. We did not have the full-scale social work program that we have at the present time. I continued to chair the Department of Sociology/Anthropology until September of 1976 when Dr. Rollo Newsom became chair of the department. He chaired it for the next five years, and then Dr. Watts, who is the present chairman, became chairman. I think it might be interested to know that Dr. Billy Joe Franklin and I were graduate students together here at UT from 1965–70, and I got Dr. Franklin his job here. He taught with us a couple of years, left here, and eventually came back as dean of liberal arts, and went on to become vice president of academic affairs of Stephen F. Austin, later president of A&I and now president of Lamar University. Dr. James Standley was in the Department of Sociology at one time, went from here to become the dean of applied arts at Stephen F. Austin. Dr. Newsom, I’m sure many people are well aware of now, was a member of this department, became dean of general studies, and is now vice president for academic affairs. So, we have had a number of people who have gone through the department and became administrators. One of our star graduates of this department, Parker Frisbie, is now chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas. So, we have had a number of different individuals that have gone on to administrative positions from here.
One thing I would like to mention is that when the old social science department existed, that reflected, as I said, the fact that this was a teacher’s college. Dr. Flowers wanted very much to keep Southwest Texas as a teacher’s college and keep it as a small college, and his great contribution was building the strong education program that we have here. We are among the top producers of teachers in the whole United States, not just Texas, and we owe a lot of that to Dr. Flowers. There was a moment, or an attempt at least, during his administration to try to change the college’s name to San Marcos College, but he opposed that; he wanted to keep that regional and that teacher’s name in there. I often wonder what would have happened if we would be known today as San Marcos University rather than Southwest Texas State University. But tied to the administration, Dr. Flowers was the San Marcos School District. Now, in those days, since this was a teacher’s college, as was true on most of the campuses, we had a laboratory school. What is now our Evans Center, and the sociology department will be moving to the new Evans Liberal Arts Building shortly, that was the elementary school. And what is now the Psychology Building was the San Marcos High School. What in effect the university did, or the college in those days, was to provide the facilities for the public school in return for being able to use the classrooms for student teaching, for observation, for testing, etcetera—the members of the Laboratory School, this was the University of Chicago idea, John Dewey’s idea, they were regarded as a part of the faculty. One of my most influential teachers was a Miss Wildman, who was a social science teacher in the high school. In fact, I did my student teaching under her in what is now the Psychology Building, here on campus.
There were a lot of activities that used to go on at Sewell Park. When I graduated in the 1940s, graduation exercises were held at Sewell Park, when the weather permitted. There was an island that extended out into the river, it’s still there today connected with one of the bridges, and the graduates would be on the island and their families which sat across the river. They would watch the graduation ceremonies from there.
Baker: That is a neat setting.
Schultz: It was. It was a beautiful setting, and it was a place that I think added something like what you think of like the “Old Ivy” tradition of the school. Perhaps, a pastoral setting for what was really a college that was closely associated with being a farm trade center. Also, at Sewell Park in those days, once a year they would hold what they called a “water pageant.” The closest thing I can get in comparison is that, they were always on a much smaller scale, would be something like the River Parade that occurs in San Antonio today during the Fiesta Days. There would be floats that would come down the river. You would have lighted swimmers that would have battery-operated lights that would be on their arms and swimming in formations. This was always done in the evening time. It was a beautiful sight to see, and people would come from miles around. It was a big event in this particular area to watch the water pageant on the river each year. Another very vivid memory I have of Sewell Park is that it was very close to “Dog Patch,” and each year the agricultural department would help do the barbequing. Now kickers were big on campus in those days. There were literally pits that were dug up on the high side of the river, and they would barbeque whole calves along that river in those pits. You could smell that barbequing going on as much as twenty-four hours before you got to eat the barbeque.
Baker: (Chuckle) I guess you were ready to eat.
Schultz: I was indeed ready to eat at that time. So, “Frontier Days” is what they called it, [and it] was a great big event on campus at that time.
I think each of our presidents have made some very definite contributions to the campus. I’ve mentioned in terms about Flowers, McCrocklin, and Jones, actually Dr. Smith was also important to this campus in that he helped us to systemize a lot of procedures that were done in perhaps a far too casual of a fashion. I would agree that we became too bureaucratic, but this was a considerable step beyond where we used to not have any kind of formal budgets, and no one knew exactly how much money you were going to be operating within the department, and it was all guesswork. Requests for money were written on little slips of papers and passed from one office to the other. In that sense, I think that getting some type of systemization for our financing was not bad. I think we did become far too bureaucratized, and I think Dr. Hardestry, our present president, has certainly helped us to come back to a more balanced kind of an approach. To me, he has restored great power, authority, and decision in policy-making to the academics. I think that has been a tremendous step. Perhaps more so than we have had from any other president.
I might also comment that I knew Dr. Cecil Evans, who was president before Dr. Flowers. In fact, I knew all the presidents with the exception of the very first two. Dr. Evans was retired, but I talked with him on various occasions because when I first went to graduate school at UT he and I sometimes commuted together on the same bus. Because he was going to UT at that time, he used a large ledger, like you might expect someone to keep accounts in for a business, and he used that to collect all his notes for his writing of history of Texas education, which is still regarded as a standard work up through about 1945 in terms of the history of education of the State of Texas.
Before we wrap up, there’s one other thing I would just like to mention quickly, when I was talking about the barbeque, that we still have something of that today. We have what we call a men’s faculty club, and I suppose that is still regarded as a male chauvinist kind of thing that is carried on beyond its time. In the earlier days, when the faculty numbered only a little over one hundred, this was organized and usually held at Deacon Wright’s, who was the chair of the English department, home, which was located next to Ralph Houston, who was a long-time in liberal arts. That was always at the end of deer season, and there would be a barbeque of deer, and that was a way of bringing together all the men on the faculty. Most of the faculty were men at that time, and they would get together for fellowship. The other kind of fellowship in Dr. Flowers’s day was that we would have book reviews in which faculty and their spouses would go and have tea and have a book review at Dr. Flowers’s home. His home was a huge two-story white house, sitting about where the old president’s home was located, what we refer as the old president’s home before the current one. The current one is just off this side of the library.
I suppose that one other person I should mention that is one of the great legends of the campus was Professor Green. I had one class under Professor Green and, of course, was a colleague of his for about two or three years. He was noted on campus as wearing green eyeshades. He taught history and political science. He chewed tobacco, and one of my most vivid memories I have of him is going to his office one time to interview with him, and he pulled open his desk drawer, and spit into the drawer. He chewed tobacco often in his class, and we had no air conditioning back in those days. So he would just go over to the window and spit out the window. So, you knew if you were passing by where Professor Green taught, you wanted to be careful not to step by his window. He had been a mentor of LBJ and was invited by LBJ eventually to visit him in the White House. He was still alive when LBJ became President of the United States. He was a very provocative teacher. He was not one that imparted a lot of great detailed information, but he liked to try to make people think, and that was one of the ways in which built his reputation. He sponsored a group called the Jeffersonians. They were one of what were then called “literary societies.”
We did not have fraternities and sororities back then. So, what you wanted to do back then was be invited to join one of the literary societies. These were social organizations of students on campus. Among the ones for the men was the Jerffersonians, sponsored by Apockreme, was one of your important ones. Also, a very important organization was Alpha Chi, which is the scholarship society. That was headed by Dr. Alfred Nolle and by Dr. Lueders, who taught in the modern language department. Alpha Chi, even when I came back in the 1960s, the ceremonies were looked forward to by the students, by their families also. To be initiated into Alpha Chi, families would come and stay in the local motel overnight so they could be here when their children were initiated into this honor society. This was done in a very careful ritual using lighted candles and repeating certain kinds of, I guess you could call them educational axioms about our dedication to truth and honesty and for the search of knowledge. Yet it was a very important high point. I think sometimes that that kind of relationship with the school and parents and students was something that has been lost as we have become a larger university. I’m not arguing that I would like to go back to a two thousand- or three thousand-student school, but I think as we look to the future, that one of the things that we must work very, very hard to try to do, is to maintain that reputation that we have had for many years, being called the “friendly campus on the hill.”
End of interview